Jon
Kennedy, Nanty Glo Home Page webmaster and owner,
is a former teen and campus minister. He began his journalism
career as teen columnist for the Nanty Glo Journal
and its sister weekly newspapers from 1957 to '62 and
became the Journal's third editor in 1962 at age
20. He has edited other newspapers and magazines, and
more recently, webzines, ever since. His articles have
appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Detroit Free
Press, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Christianity Today,
and many other publications. His Jonals appear here on
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.Complete index of Jon Kennedy's
Jonal articles

A TV blog

Jonal entry 1180 | May 10 2011

There
hasn't been a written blog entry here since late last year (only "video"
ones). That year-end one elicited not a single response and all the
others for the four months or more before that brought only negative
responses or smart-aleck nonresponses . . . efforts to bait me. I
never meant to let cheap shots silence me, but with no one reading,
why bother getting back up, especially when I've had lots of writing
to do on the three books I've been jugglingfinishing, rewriting,
marketing, having reviewed, tweakedfor
the past three years (for example, the second one, "finished"
a year and a half ago but not yet contracted to a publisher, had its
latest manuscript page added yesterday).

Still,
journalism is my game and there probably hasn't been a day in which
I haven't at least run some blog ideas through the meat grinder I
call my brain. Possibly the one most likely to at least catch the
attention of more potential readers than any other I've put in the
grinder, is some thoughts about television. I've had a preference
for "columns" (that's what they called "blogs"
in the old days) with a lot of ideas only thematically (but not "logically"
) related . . . at least since I used to read the three-dot columns
of Walter Winchell back in the 1950s. So some random thoughts on TV
these days.

Does it seem to you that these days the
biggest advertisers on prime time are drug companies hawking some
pill, device, or treatment (the word I wanted to put in here was "cure,"
but come to think of it I can't remember any of them claiming they
can cure anything).

And is it just me, or is the second largest
bloc of advertisers legal firms soliciting supporters of their lawsuits
against the drug companies whose nostrums were among the biggest advertisers
a year or two ago but have been found to cause cancer or some other
dread side effect the earlier ads failed to mention? You may already
be a winner, some of these declare by way of getting you to add your
name to their plaintiff list.

Remember the episode of Cheers in
which parents of a bride-to-be told one of the main characters in
that scene that the bride's family made their money by being "sue-ers,"
people who sue in court to get compensation for their pain and suffering?
A few suggestions about the high cost of medical care these days.

I've been so "anglicized" by
all the trips I've made to England and the UK in the past decade or
so that probably my favorite TV fare now is anything from Great Britain,
which I see, of course, only on one of the four PBS channels the Dish
network sporadically provides for my viewing pleasure. I like everything
from Larkrise to Candleford, Pierot and Rosemary
and Thyme to Inspector Lewis and As Time Goes By;
even Life on Mars. Less so Keeping Up Appearances, though
it's better than 90 percent of the American sitcoms being made these
days....

Of these, Life on Mars is the weirdest,
most intriguing, and creative. Each episode begins with a London police
officer saying that he was severely injured in an accident that put
him in a coma in which he sees himself as also a London police officer,
but in the mid-1970's, some three decades earlier than now. There
is nothing about the planet Mars in the show, it's just that things
in the '70's are as strange to him as they would be if he were on
another planet. One of the main themes is how much society has evolved
since then, when women and minority populations were at the disposal
of the white middle class male overlords of society (you can also
catch hints of this in the US cop shows that get into "cold cases,"
investigating crimes committed when corruption was rife then in contrast
to the utopia we know now).

Any favorite shows on your viewing schedule,
or ones you consider favorites to hate?

Today's chuckle

Useful work phrases: I'll try being nicer if you'll
try being smarter.

Thought for today

A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking
trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others.

 C.S. Lewis (1898
- 1963)

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Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia, from Adams Media, F&W
Publications, is available for purchase in support of the
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It is also available on Amazon.